Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man. It Is What A Man Does, Is What Happens to Him.

We learn a lot of lessons in life as we skip along through it. Some profound and some so subtle that we hardly reaslised what we had learned from a person or experience.

Like a lot of Aussie’s before and after me, I filled a back pack and took off for two years wandering around London and Europe, at the tender age of 21. Although I did fall into the trap of living and working in London for probably too long rather than exploring the rest of Europe, it definitely was a life changing experience.

Everyone has heard of the horror stories of Contiki tours. Boys (and girls) throwing up in buses everybody in bad form as they do a whirl wind tour of X amount of cities crammed into a short time focusing on the highlights of each city and not remembering much by the time they got back.

For this reason, I have always found myself looking down my nose at the mention of the company. However, if the truth be known, I was conducting my own private Contiki tour, without really realising it.

I may not have been in a bus or throwing up but rushing around and not really taking it all in, certainly not appreciating things and savouring the moment, the way I do now.

This time I want to breath it in, soak it up, fill my pores and my very being, trap it into my soul.

Of course you can’t force this, you can’t make something like that happen, it just does.

After reading piles of travel narravtives, I am part of that romantic, starry-eyed group who want to insert themselves into the pages of those memoirs. Sometimes it takes something earth shattering, something that really kicks you in the guts, to realise that money doesn’t matter, in fact a lot of things that seemed super important all seem to take a back seat.

Some really bad experiences can sometimes be a devil in disguise, that push you from being one of the crowd who wished they were going, to actually, getting off the fat one, pulling the finger out and doing something about it.

We all have, well most of us have core ideals, morals, integrity, love and values, note I said most of us, of late I have learned that some people are completely void of all of these ‘qualities’.

I want to take more out of this impending trip, I want to suck the life out of it, even if I end up with something small but big enough to empower me, to motivate me and restore my faith in people:

Experience Is Not What Happens To A Man. It Is What A Man Does, Is What Happens to Him.